SATURDAY NIGHT DRIVE

Friday

Spectator gates at Peoria Speedway hadn’t yet opened, but Robert Crump and Harold Massey already had their Modified race car parked in the pits.

Spectator gates at Peoria Speedway hadn’t yet opened, but Robert Crump and Harold Massey already had their Modified race car parked in the pits.

Driver Ray Guss Jr., they said, would be arriving in about an hour but the car owner and sponsor sat in the shade of the tow vehicle, swapping racing stories.

It was a typical Saturday night at the dirt track for Crump, Massey and the drivers, pit crews, workers and spectators — the kind of night repeated every weekend at hundreds of such tracks all over the country.

Peoria Speedway has been at its current location on Farmington Road since 1964 after moving from the area which is now Pioneer Park. This is its 61st season.

Bob Cowell Sr., 52, of East Peoria has been racing at the quarter-mile dirt track 36 of those years.

"I started when I was 16," said Cowell, who started racing before many of the drivers in his class were even born. "I’ve run Late Models, Modifieds and Figure Eights, when they had Figure Eights out here."

For the past three years, he has driven a Street Stock for Bud and Linda Geuvens, also of East Peoria.

"I like to race here because it’s close to home," said Cowell.

It’s also close enough for his 87-year-old mother, Hazel, to come and watch. "She doesn’t miss a weekend," Cowell said.

Sitting in a wheelchair in the first row of the grandstands, his mother not only confirmed that, she said she used to sell beer in the pits.

"They don’t allow that any longer," she said, moving on to a story about her son’s early racing days.

"I went to a Cursillo one weekend, which was unusual," she said of heading to the religious retreat, "and when I came back, my car wouldn’t start. He thought I was coming the next day, but I came home a day early and he had taken the motor out of my car and put it in his race car."

Back in the pits, Josh Mitzelfelt, 18, had his own motor under the hood of his Hornet, the entry-level class at Peoria Speedway. He was busy looking it over.

The Trivoli resident was preparing for his very first race, with pit-crew help and moral support from buddies Jason Oppe of Yates City, Jake Haulk of Yates City and Jeremy Baumgardner of Hanna City.

"I bought my car from some guy in Washington for 250 bucks," he said. "I thought it would be fun. Something to do, I guess."

Mitzelfelt’s boss at D & N Autobody in Hanna City, Noah Faw of East Peoria, is in his first season of racing. He’s made six races in the Street Stock class.

"I’ve been coming down here for five or six years," he said. "I build engines for a lot of the guys, but I never really wanted to race. We did a job up at the shop for a guy and instead of paying for the work, he gave me a race car. I kind of just happened upon it."

For car owner Crump, racing is his livelihood. The owner of RC Racecars started building race car chassis in 1988. He once built Late Models but now builds only Modifieds.

"I started racing in 1973 and kind of built my own cars as I went," Crump said. "Then it got to where people were wanting one or wanting me to fix things and we started building them. We’ve got hundreds of cars out there."

Car owner Geuvens only has to look out for one car, but it provides her plenty of thrills. When driver Cowell won a heat race last year, she was overjoyed.

"I about climbed over the wall," she said.

"I thought she was going to take the fence with her," said her husband, Bud, who raced for years until health problems turned him into a car owner.

Jean Porter of Farmington isn’t able to cheer for her favorite driver this year. Her granddaughter’s fiance, John Rhodes, once raced at the Speedway but is taking time off this year.

Still, she has sit in the same spot every Saturday night for the last 10 years. With her on this night was her 6-year-old granddaughter, Paige Harper of Farmington.

"I like to see the winners," said Harper.

At the end of the night, Mitzelfelt finished 17th in the 18-car Hornet finals. His boss was seventh in Street Stock, just ahead of Cowell.

And while there were no checkered flags for these drivers on this night, in the end, that didn’t really matter.

"Even after all this years," Cowell said, "I still love it."

Jane Miller can be reached
at 686-3207 or jmiller@pjstar.com.

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